Warmth + Rain =
At least here in temperate North America. Flowers are emerging, too, as well as bush buds. The trees are still more cautious about the whole notion of spring, but they’re coming around.

Tucked away in my envelope of nearly worthless — sometimes flat-out worthless — paper money is a RM1 I picked up either in 1992 or ’94. The formal name is a ringgit, though informally it’s a Malaysian dollar.

By the early 1990s, the note was on its way out, replaced by a dollar coin, an example of which I don’t have. These days, RM1 is worth about US 28 cents; I remember it trading for about 40 cents. I’d do pricing in my head in dollars, even though my pay was in yen, and 40 cents to the ringgit made it easy: half minus 10 percent (Singapore dollars were half plus 10 percent in those days).

The portrait on the note is Tuanku Abdul Rahman ibni Almarhum Tuanku Muhammad (died 1960), the first Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaya. That is, the supreme head of state, elected by the country’s other sultans, in office before the country was reorganized as Malaysia. I don’t think there’s any monarchical position anywhere else quite like it.
That’s the National Monument in Kuala Lumpur, which memorializes the Malaysian dead of the Japanese occupation and the Malayan Emergency.